The Unbearable Book Club for Unsinkable Girls (6 page)

That night, turning over in bed to prop my knee on a pillow, I heard something moving through the leaves by the side of the house. Mr. Finkle, I thought: harassing songbirds at the feeder. My mother claimed to like cats but detested Finkle, who staggered away from the feeder several mornings a week with a finch in his teeth, like a heavy man pushing away from the table after a meal.

I sat up, sweating; when I looked out the window it was still dark—too early for Finkle, who didn’t make his murderous rounds until dawn.

“I know this is it,” a voice said. “I was here last week and scoped it out.”

A second, lower voice seemed to disagree.

I am going to be murdered in my bed because my mother doesn’t believe in air-conditioning
, I thought. My window was open because fluorocarbons were depleting the ozone.
Being alive has been nice, Mom
, I thought.
Enjoy your planet!

“
A!
Are you in there?”

“Who is it?” I asked, peeling the sheet from my legs.

“Come out, come out wherever you are,” a voice sang, just loud enough to thread its way into my room.

“CeeCee?” I crept to the edge of my mattress—the thick fabric of the night only inches away—opened the screen, and stuck my head out. CeeCee was standing on
the grass about eight feet below. “What are you doing here?” I asked.

“My mother informs me that I’m supposed to be calling you,” she said. “But I don’t have your cell.”

“Oh. Should I give you the number?”

“Yeah, but I don’t need it right now, because I’m already here. Are you coming out?”

“Outdoors?” I asked. In the thicker darkness near the pom-pom blooms of my mother’s hydrangeas, I saw the orange tip of a cigarette. “Is somebody with you?”

“Yeah, that’s Jeff,” CeeCee said.

“Oh,” I said. “Who’s Jeff?”

“Jeff Pardullo. He’s going to catch you.”

I looked at the cigarette tip. “I could just come to the front door,” I said.

“Look, A. I came all the way over here to see you,” CeeCee said. “Just come out the window. That’s the plan. Your mom’ll hear you if you open the door.”

My mother probably wouldn’t have heard me. She went to bed at night as if assembling equipment for a difficult voyage, sleeping with a bite plate in her mouth (to keep her from grinding her molars) and a satin eye mask over her face. And she had a machine on her bedside table that played an endless
whssshh
ing of ocean waves against the shore.

“It’s not like you’re busy. You were only sleeping,” CeeCee said. “All you have to do is sit on the windowsill. Jeff does the rest.”

How strong is Jeff?
I wondered. CeeCee stepped into a narrow patch of moonlight that briefly illuminated her
upturned face like a coin. It made no sense to climb through the window. But maybe I didn’t want to be bored all summer. And maybe this was the sort of new and invigorating experience my mother had been recommending, one of the ways I could broaden my view of the world.

“All right,” I said. “But I have to get dressed. And put on my brace.”

“What the hell—is she in a wheelchair?” the Jeff-voice asked.

CeeCee told me to hurry up.

On an unnamed island near the Canadian border, Liz was probably turning over in her sleeping bag, dreaming peacefully under the stars. I put on a pair of pajama pants and flip-flops and a shirt and my brace, and at the last minute—thinking strategically—I picked up my purse so I’d have a key. I could sit on the purse on my way out the window, and I’d have a phone in case CeeCee’s plan was to play an amusing joke on me that involved my being kidnapped or killed.

Once I stuck my head through the window again, I saw her out in the yard, fake-boxing with a person who must have been Jeff. I put my purse on the sill and sat on it, perched above them as if on a swing.

Girl Plunges Needlessly Through Window and Mangles Already-Injured Leg
, the morning headline would say. I braced my arms against the window frame. “Ready?” I asked.

A pair of hands with knobby fingers grabbed my hips and tugged and lifted me down. I lost a few chunks of skin from the back of one thigh.

“Uooof,” a voice said. Whoever Jeff was, I could feel
him stagger when I collided with his chest. I grabbed his shoulder to steady myself, and looked up.

He was taller than I was, and his face was interesting but not handsome. His eyes were set deeply and close together, and his eyebrows were thick, like dark slashes of paint. He was probably nineteen or twenty. He smelled like cigarettes and mint, and his cheeks were stubbly, as if he was thinking of growing a beard.

I let go of his shoulder and we started walking away from the house. I had left the window open behind me. I thought about the books I had read in which a character discovers a door into a place she didn’t know existed: Alice tumbling down the rabbit hole, Mary Lennox opening the hidden gate to the secret garden, Lucy Pevensie pushing her way through the back of the wardrobe.

“I get so bored at night,” CeeCee said. “I have insomnia. Do you?”

“Not usually,” I said. “I love to sleep. My astrological sign is the sloth.”

CeeCee was twirling a golf club in her hands like a baton. Jeff walked in front of us. “I was lying in bed doing nothing,” CeeCee said, “and for some reason I started thinking about our Intolerable Book Bondage Group for Wayward Girls, and I remembered that my mother had told me to call you. What was it about?”

“Getting a ride to the pool,” I said.

We had reached the curb. Jeff took a set of keys from his pocket.

“The pool’s probably closed,” CeeCee said. “But we can drive past it.”

I said I was looking for a ride during the
daytime
.

“Well, we need to go somewhere,” CeeCee said. “We have a car. I found this old putter in my dad’s closet, so maybe we should go to the mini-putt.”

Jeff popped the locks on a rusted blue four-door.

“The mini-putt is probably closed also,” I said. I had looked at my clock—a parting glance—on my way out the window: it was two-fifteen.

“The best part is that Jeff’s decided to let me drive,” CeeCee said. “I’m an excellent driver.”

Jeff let out a yip—a single high-pitched laugh, like a hyena’s. “You’re not touching the driver’s side of my car.”

I paused on the slope of my neighbors’ lawn. A chain of events, I thought, was being set into motion, and it seemed very likely that, at some future time, this particular link in the chain would be the one I’d regret.

“What’s the matter?” Seeing me hesitate, CeeCee had opened the front passenger door of the car. “A, he’s my sister’s boyfriend,” she said. “Do you think I’d drive off with a total stranger? Do you think I’m an idiot?”

Kind of
, I thought. But I got in. She sat in front next to Jeff; I climbed in back.

I wasn’t used to driving around West New Hope in the middle of the night, and I didn’t like the way the ordinary landmarks seemed to have changed, the trees looming larger, the houses like sinister imitations of themselves.

CeeCee sat sideways in her seat, with her feet in Jeff’s lap. “Look at the earring I found,” she said. She twirled it in her fingers near Jeff, but he ignored her. “A, are your ears pieced? Jeff doesn’t want to pierce his ear.”

I had one hole in each earlobe. That was the extent of my fashion sense.

“This would look good on you,” CeeCee said.

We drove past the high school and the junior high, Jeff driving with one hand as if barely involved in the car’s operation.

“I could pierce your ear for you right now.” CeeCee turned around in her seat and faced me. “I’m really good.”

I was going to say that I
might
consider her offer, but CeeCee was already worming her way between the bucket seats into the back. “I’ve got everything we need,” she said. “Because I was going to give the earring to Jeff but he doesn’t want it. He actually spurned my generosity.”

Jeff caught my eyes in the rearview mirror.

“Now he’s going to be jealous of you,” CeeCee told me, holding the earring—some kind of sparkly stud—near my ear.

We drove past the drugstore and the bakery and then the graveyard, with its gravestones slanting to the left as if in a breeze. CeeCee knelt on the seat beside me, and I let her wipe my ear with hand sanitizer and then sat patiently under the five-watt bulb while she searched for a needle in her purse. It might seem strange that I let her perform this minor surgery. But as we drove past the graveyard I looked at the graves and thought about the bodies underground, all those people lying on their backs doing nothing, and I thought any one of them would jump at the chance to be alive and to be riding in a car with the windows down, the hot breeze of a summer night streaming in. If anyone
asked me later why I let CeeCee put a hole in my ear in a moving vehicle, I could truthfully say,
Dead people told me I should
.

But I thought she was going to pierce the lobe, not the flap and gristle of my upper ear.

“Don’t yell,” she said. She was using a bar of soap as a backstop. “I haven’t punched it all the way through yet.” She had pushed my head against the window and was leaning over me, her bony elbow on my shoulder, her knee on my leg.

“I think I’m gonna throw up,” I said.

Jeff jerked the wheel, CeeCee’s head smacked the window, and I felt a slow and painful
pop
as the earring tore a path through my skin. We pulled into a gravel parking lot by the mini-putt. A cloud of dust blossomed like a colorless flower around the car.

I wrenched the door open and leaned out, and CeeCee gave me a tissue for my ear. “Now we’ll distract you with some golf,” she said. “Jeff can keep score. You’ll share my putter.”

I stood up and tested my shaky legs, then walked behind her to the wooden shack where Mr. Baxter usually sold tickets. Even in daylight the mini-putt was faded and pale, the sign over our heads reading
AIRY GOLF
and the artificial turf peeling up at the edges; now, after dark, the battered fiberglass fairy-tale characters lurked in the gloom. “I don’t think we’ll be able to see the holes,” I said.

CeeCee started slashing through the brush beneath the sign. “Jeff, come and help me find a ball.”

Jeff sat on the fence, consulting his phone.

“Jeff’s moody tonight. We can ignore him. Here.” CeeCee found a dented yellow ball. “You first.”

My ear was throbbing. Trying not to touch it, I set the ball on the slab of artificial grass that served as a tee. I looked down the length of raggedy carpet toward Snow White, who was dancing with half a dozen dwarves. (The seventh dwarf had been abducted; only his fiberglass foot had been left behind.)

I’d never played mini-golf in the middle of the night and was trying to orient myself. “Aren’t you going to be tired during summer school tomorrow?” I asked. The ball collided with the hem of Snow White’s dress.

“That doesn’t matter.
Je ne me soucie pas
,” CeeCee said.

Though I couldn’t quite tell where the hole was, I took two more strokes. The ball
thwocked
squarely against the boards.

Jeff climbed off the fence and announced that he had to run an errand.
At two-thirty a.m.?

“Come back soon,” CeeCee called. She tapped the ball into the cup, and we watched Jeff get into his car and drive off.

We took turns at Hansel and Gretel, Jack and the Beanstalk, and the Three Billy Goats Gruff. “That middle goat looks like Jeff,” CeeCee said. “Do you have a crush on him yet?”

“Why are we out here?” I asked.

“I needed to get out,” CeeCee said. “I can’t think during the day, when other people are awake. I feel like everybody clogs up the air with their thoughts.”

A pair of headlights painted the weeds in the empty lot across the street. CeeCee crouched behind one of the goats and grabbed the back of my shirt and pulled me down with her; I tumbled over, awkward because of my leg.

“We should have brought something to eat,” she said when the car squealed away. She opened my purse and rooted through it. “Do you have any gum in here, or—” She held up my copy of
Frankenstein
. “You brought this with you?”

“I forgot it was in there.” I rubbed some gravel off my arm.

CeeCee angled the book so she could read the back cover in a swath of moonlight. “What’s a … charnel house?” she asked.

“It’s one of those aboveground graves,” I said. “You know—where instead of burying people underground they build a sort of miniature stone house and put the bodies on shelves inside it.”

“Dead people in bunk beds,” CeeCee said. “Weird.” She lay down on the artificial turf. The wind rattled the birch trees behind us. “Have you ever dug up anything in a graveyard?”

“No.” I was afraid to ask her if she had.

She glanced at her phone. “Maybe your father’s dead and buried somewhere and your mother hasn’t told you. Do you think she’s lying to you about him?”

“Why would she lie about him?” I asked.

“I don’t know. I don’t know your mother.” CeeCee gave me the book. “Read me something.”

“You want me to read to you? Out loud?”

“Well, I won’t be able to hear you if you read to yourself.” She tucked my purse under her head, for a pillow. “You don’t have to start at the beginning. I’ll follow along. Just read something good.”

I flipped through the chapters, leaning against the largest of the billy goats and holding the book so its pages caught the light of the moon.
“It was on a dreary night of November,”
I began,
“that I beheld the accomplishment of my toils. With an anxiety that almost amounted to agony, I collected the instruments of life around me, that I might infuse a spark of being into the lifeless thing that lay at my feet.”

“So he’s going to flip a switch and electrocute the monster?” CeeCee asked.

“Something like that.”

Her face was shaded by the lily pad that belonged to the Frog Prince. “Go ahead. Keep going.”

I felt embarrassed, reading aloud in the middle of the night at the mini-putt, but Jeff wasn’t back and no one else was around, so I read about the monster coming to life, about his
shrivelled complexion and straight black lips
, and about Frankenstein, his creator, running away and then fainting because of what he had done. I read about the monster tearing around Switzerland, insulted and lonely. My leg started to ache but I ignored it.